"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

Ted Cruz is really explicit that voters need guns in case they need
to use them against police, federal law enforcement or other government
officials.It's not an uncommon argument among gun rights enthusiasts. But
national politicians and certainly presidential candidates seldom get so
pointed and specific about arguing that the key importance of the 2nd
Amendment is to have guns to shoot government officials if you decide
they are creating a tyranny. What Sharron Angle once called "second amendment remedies". But Ted Cruz is going there big time in a new fundraising email. Check it out. In a sense, this is totally Cruz's MO. I suspect it's precisely
because few mainstream politicians are willing to state the matter so
starkly that he and his advisors see a big advantage of being the one
who will.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Appearing on ABC’s This Week, frequent panelist and Weekly Standard
editor Bill Kristol tossed out the name of former Vice President Dick
Cheney as a possible contender for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.Prompted by host George Stephanopoulous to name “the most promising
Republican candidate not in the race yet,” panel members named Jeb Bush —
who has yet to announce — with Democratic strategist Donna Brazile
suggesting 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney.“You know, I go back to Mitt Romney. I mean, look, you don’t like old
faces, but you know what, he did run a good game last time,” Brazille
said.After talk show host Tavis Smiley suggested South Dakota Senator John
Thune, a smirking Kristol suggested the former vice president.“If they get to nominate Hillary Clinton, why don’t we get to
nominate Dick Cheney? I mean, he has a much… he has a much better
record,” Kistol said as the entire panel burst into laughter.“He has a much better record,” Kristol repeated as Smiley mock lamented, “God help us all.”...............................

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Archaeologists who want to learn more about our ancestors,
and at the same time are concerned about global warming, must have very
mixed feelings: The increasing number of objects found at melting
Norwegian glaciers is a treasure trove of new knowledge.The number of objects is so big that the growing archeological field
in the autumn of 2014 got its own magazine; Journal of Glacial
Archaeology. A large part of the content will be descriptions of items
found at Norwegian glaciers, according to the research portal forskning.noThere are about 2500 glaciers in Norway, equally divided between
Southern and Northern Norway, which covers approximately 0.7% of the
total land area.Only in Oppland county, about 2,000 objects have melted out of the
ice. There are also made many findings in the counties of Rogaland, Møre
og Romsdal and Hordaland, as well as some in Northern Norway.

The oldest ice in the mountains of Southern Norway is about 6600-6700
years old, and in many places the glaciers now are melting down to the
oldest layers. Also in the Rocky Mountains, the Andes and the Alps,
objects from ancient mountain people are uncovered.New KnowledgeAt the Lendbreen glacier in Oppland, archaeologists have found a
number of items. On an old road used to cross the mountains, both
objects related to hunting, but also more mundane items like gloves and
shoes, are found.All the horse bones tell that the route was hazardous for both people and animals.The objects can provide new knowledge about the people who have lived
in Norway back to the Stone Age. Meanwhile, the melting process is so
quick that archaeologists must work fast to rescue and preserve them for
posterity.

Monday, April 06, 2015

Cruz, Walker, Kirk and—especially—Bolton are furious at the world. Their solution: Declare war on it.

At
the end of a week when many paused to reflect during Passover and
Easter ceremonies, a question with no real answer seemed to crash into
our culture with all the subtlety of a marching band in a funeral
parlor: Why do so many Republicans seem so angry all the time at so much
around us?The fury of some like Ted Cruz is understandable. It’s
fueled by his massive ego and outsized ambition along with his personal
belief that he is so smart and the rest of us are so pedestrian that he
can manipulate opinion to win the Republican nomination for president
with the support of the mentally ill wing of his party.“A real
president,” Cruz the bombardier said last week, “would stand up and say
on the world stage: Under no circumstances will Iran be allowed to
acquire nuclear weapons. Iran will either stop or we will stop them.”Then
there is the minor league Cruz, the tough talking, totally
in-over-his-head governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who is running to
crack down on the salaries of teachers, cops and firefighters
everywhere. Oh, he’ll also teach Iran a good lesson by throwing any deal
out the window no matter what other countries might think. Imagine
Scotty informing Angela Merkel of his decision while he wears his
Cheese-Head Hat.There are so many others too. There’s the kid who
started the pen pal club with the ayatollah, Tom Cotton. There’s the
mental midget from Illinois, Mark Kirk, who went right to the basement
for his best thought on Iran, claiming that England got a better deal
from Hitler than the U.S. got from Teheran. Kirk, not a history major.But
my personal favorite? In this corner, from Baltimore, wearing the
costume of a true warrior, locked and loaded and ready to roll, the
former Ambassador to the United Nations, John “Bombs Away” Bolton. He
took to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times to declare war on Iran. After all, why waste time!“The
inconvenient truth is that only military action…” Field Marshall Bolton
wrote, “can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a
strike can still succeed.”

Bolton, of course, is one of the Mensa members who told George W.
Bush that it would be swell to go to war in Iraq. Twelve years later
things are really going well there.At least Bolton knows war on a
first hand basis. At age 18 he was in South Vietnam where….OH, I’M
SORRY…MY MISTAKE…that was another Bolton. That was Dennis Bolton from
Bedford, Ind., born two weeks before John Bolton was born in Baltimore
in November 1968. Two different young men with two different tales to
tell.Dennis Bolton went to Vietnam. John Bolton who went to Yale.
Dennis Bolton was killed near DaNang on April 19, 1967 where he served
with the Marines while John Bolton finished his freshman year at New
Haven.In 1967, Bedford had a population of about 13,000. It’s a
nice small town where Gene Hackman could have filmed ‘Hoosiers’, one of
the great sports films ever. Ten young men from Bedford were killed in
Vietnam.Indiana, of course, is the state where Mike Pence and
Republicans in the state legislature spent the week clowning it up over
their lost fight to make it harder for some Americans simply to be
happy. Make no mistake about it, their war was against same sex marriage
and they suffered a TKO when the country turned against them in the
snap of a finger, an overnight knock-out delivered with stunning speed.
But I digress.In 1967, Baltimore had a population of about
930,000. It’s a tough town with a lot of different neighborhoods, some
dangerous, many working class where Barry Levinson hadn’t made “Diner”
yet and HBO hadn’t given us the gift that is “The Wire.” Four hundred
and seventeen residents of Baltimore were killed in Vietnam.Dennis Bolton’s name is on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. John Bolton’s name was on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times as well as on the lips of some angry, fevered lunatics whose principal policy option is to fight rather than talk.Obviously,
Bolton never made it to Vietnam. He joined the Maryland National Guard
to avoid going to Vietnam and, hey, good for him. At least he served.Of
course, he blamed his absence from combat on the politics of the time.
On liberals like Ted Kennedy and others, claiming they had already lost
the war by the time he was ready to take on the North Vietnamese Army. I
guess that explains the itch, the unfulfilled need, the frustration
that guys like Bolton have lived with across the decades.And
today, "Bombs Away" Bolton still has a strong desire to light it up. And
according to some pundits he's even considering a run for president.
Obviously his platform will remain as unchanged as his thinking:
Different time, different dangers, different countries but same selfish
solution: Send someone else’s kids to fight and die while Bolton and
others play with a lit fuse in a world more dangerous than dynamite.